Moore's "Liberty" offers warning in light of Afghan war

Upon finishing the prodigiously researched and incisively written book, "Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France" by Lucy Moore, one is left to consider the following:

1. History is indeed written by the victors, and because men consistently emerged as winners, the thoughts and deeds of 50% of history's actors have been smothered by prejudice. France would have been far more ably led had brilliant and humane people (and natural politicians) such as Manon Roland and Germaine de Stael been in power rather than despots like Robespierre and Napoleon.
   
2. Gender wars are not new to the post-World War II era. French women who took up arms to fight for freedom in the late eighteenth century soon found themselves suppressed by their male comrades. How does this differ from Canadian acquiescence in supporting Afghanistan's morally bankrupt government in its campaign to enslave female citizens?
   
3. Those who forcibly deny freedom to a portion of society will eventually become prey to tyranny themselves. The Jacobins of revolutionary France brutally put down anyone who opposed them until, eventually, they became consumed by paranoia. They and their successors forcibly marginalized women and denied them any role in public affairs. It never occured to them that by denying rights to the women who forged the revolution, they had removed a primary pillar that kept their government alive; soon enough it was the necks Robespierre and his allies that rested on the guillotine. It is a rule of politics that if you lose support from your "base" then your prospects are grim.
   
4. Liberty must never be taken for granted, and just as rights can be won they can be lost. Women of revolutionary France had achieved limited rights of assembly, for example, that were subsequently struck down in a reactionary backlash. Antiquated dress codes that kept women encased in whalebone and drapery were cast aside, along with the monarchy, in favour of clothing that would not look too out of place among youth of the late twentieth century; but by 1800 the corsets were back - a symbol of the restrictions placed on women.

For those who want to learn a necessary aspect of western history, I cannot recommend Moore's book too highly.

Will the digital age render us invisible to our granchildren?

Before writing The Big Hop: The North Atlantic Air Race, I needed to conduct a great deal of research on aviators of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. To some degree, this meant acquiring copies of primary documents, but mostly I delved into newspaper records. Where possible, I cross-referenced - checking accounts of the same events but from the perspective of two or more newspapers.

One of the surprises that emerged from this research was in fact how much "new" material I was able to recover; I frequently stumbled across hitherto unknown (to me) pilots, many of whom appeared to have been overlooked by previous historians. But records of their achievements and failures could be found, if someone looked hard enough, because a newspaper - often the New York Times - made the effort to record them in print.

Today, newspapers are in trouble, so much so that even the New York Times could disappear. So as reporters are laid off and papers shut down their presses, how are future generations supposed to learn about our era? Digital technology is the obvious answer, but unfortunately - as anyone who owns a computer whose hard drive has seized up - this form of record keeping is fragile at best.

In fact, in the course of time, it is a near certainty that the Wikipedias, Googles, Yahoos and all future technology-dependent data storage systems will fail or be destroyed.

Like the mythic (is it?) contintent of Atlantis, we could be all but invisible to future generations.